Downstream
Navy Yard, 2017
mixed media on paper, 11” x 14”
I wanted to explore the ‘preciousness’ of knit goods within the proscribed aquatic theme. Many people think of knitting in terms of quaint baby gifts or treasured sweaters that someone’s grandmother toiled over. When I saw ‘toilet paper’ as one of the Underwater New York objects, I immediately thought ‘why not?’ I used thin cotton yarn and a variety of differently sized needles and stitches to create the distressed fabric I had in mind. Then Keith Carver cut the fabric into pieces, floated them on the water, and photographed them. When I was in my late teens, I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of Mike Kelly’s work at the ICA in London. He had taken heaps of hand knit and crocheted stuffed animals and amassed them in different configurations. Upon seeing them I immediately burst into tears – and I didn’t know why. Later, as I furthered my art history studies, I began to realize that I had responded to what he refers to as ‘the emotional usury’ of the handmade item. I come from a family where it is stressed that true love is displayed by making, not buying, a gift for a person. How I struggled to love some of the resulting gifts! The mixture of guilt and anguish at not being able to do so – after someone had spent so much time and effort on their creation – is what Mike Kelly’s work dredged up in me. But I can’t help myself. I knit for people all of the time and I cross my fingers that they truly like what I make for them. So it was balancing and cathartic for me to knit something as repugnant and ugly as toilet paper, something that has no use or value whatsoever except as a thought.
My recent paintings are explorations of the way landscape can be composed from fragments of experience. Using the vocabulary of modernist abstraction, my aim has been to capture visual records of how we understand and remember our environment in pictorial form. What particularly interests me is how we locate ourselves in a landscape and how our sense of landscape is influenced by all the various forms of travel, both real and virtual that contemporary life offers us.
I create abstract aerial views that draw from a variety of sources including printed maps, Google Earth, drone photography and other digital information systems, as well as my own memory of place. In the 21st Century we’re bombarded with these visual information systems, which color our understanding of the world around us. When we navigate the world, we often find ourselves somewhere we have first encountered beforehand in symbolic reduced form. This has an impact on our understanding of landscape that is ever changing with contemporary society. My work contemplates how the language of painting can represent these shifts.
Whereas the smaller paintings I make are often directly from memory, the larger work uses historic maps as a starting point. The most recent of these involve low lying coastal areas that will one day be affected by rising oceans, something that has been preoccupying me. Shape and color, negative and positive space are used to create movement. I use tape lines that invoke man made and natural divisions of land and the shifts and hybrid forms that are present in visual recreations of it. Retaining some pure shapes, such as squares and triangles allows me to set up formal relationships that are the dynamic of geometric abstraction, and helps create a dialogue between rational and invented forms. I depict a kind of hovering state that mirrors both my vantage point and one that has become increasingly common with today’s visual technology. Laying the canvases on the floor of my studio as I make them allows me to consider the plane below as both cartographer and artist.
Objects
Toilet Paper
Body Of Water
All Over
About the Artist
Kris Percival is an unabashed reader, secretive writer, and discreet observer of the minutiae of everyday life, Kris Percival earned an MS in Education from Hunter College and an MFA in Film from Ohio University. Her knitting books, published by Chronicle Books, have been praised in publications ranging from O Magazine to The Wall Street Journal. She has an extensive background in teaching as well as film production. You can monitor her obsessions (both healthy and unsound) and take a gander at the things that catch her eye at http://www.tumblr.com/blog/lightandtexture.